


Seven Stories: Wendip Week 2019

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Romance, Wendip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 09:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20151298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: These seven stories are NOT in my normal Gravity Falls continuity, but are separate one-shots written for Wendip Week 2019 in response to specific writing prompts. They have no continuity within themselves, and each is a separate, independent story. The tone is all over the place, from humor to tear-jerker. Hope you like one or two!





	1. What We Have

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NOT in my normal continuity, this is a story written for Wendip Week 2019 following the first prompt, "This is fun, what you two have." In it the twins are eighteen, Wendy twenty-one, and there have been some losses in Gravity Falls. Rated M for some non-explicit, steamy Wendip.

**What We Have**

**By William Easley**

* * *

Mabel and Dipper were eighteen that summer. Over the years since their twelfth birthday, the twins had come back to Gravity Falls about once every other year—this year was the first double-header, since they had been just the previous summer.

Things in the Shack were about the same as always: Little mysteries here and there. Grunkle Stan was now retired, but still living in town. Grunkle Ford was off Lord knew where, pursuing some other anomaly. And Dipper and Mabel, after taking a year off following high school, were going to head off to college in the fall.

"This is your very last chance, Dippo," Mabel had told Dipper as they drove up that evening in June. "Tell her or lose her!"

"There's nothing to lose!" Dipper insisted. "Wendy's made it clear—we're just friends. That's all we are. That's all we'll ever be."

"Doy! If you don't put a move on her, Dipdope! She's waiting for you to do that, you know. Why do you think she's twenty-one and still hanging out here in the summers, working for Soos in the Shack? It's 'cause of your visits!"

Dipper shook his head. "She always has boyfriends."

"Huh, yeah, losers."

"Think what you want," Dipper said as they pulled into the Shack parking lot. "I remember what she told me that night after we went to the bunker."

He parked. Mabel opened the passenger door and hopped out. "Take my suitcases in. I'm gonna go say hello to Waddles."

Dipper didn't say anything, but he hauled Mabel's two heavy suitcases to the Shack's gift-shop door. And it opened, and there stood a tall, beautiful, freckled, long-legged redhead. "Hi, dork!" she said cheerfully. "Took you long enough! Where's Mabes?"

"Around back. Thanks," Dipper said as Wendy hefted one of the two suitcases. "She went to say hi to Waddles."

"Oh," Wendy said, more seriously. "Sorry, man, I didn't know."

They got all four of the suitcases inside, and then Wendy and Dipper went out back. Mabel sat on the grass, chatting away: "And our parents let us take the whole year off, and now next fall we plan to head to college—Backupsmore West, Grunkle Ford got us in—so I won't be able to come and see you every single day, but I promise when we have a break, like Fall Break or Christmas, I'll drive up and bring you more of these." She put a spray of flowers—Dipper had no idea where she'd hidden them—on the mound of Waddles's grave.

"Sorry about your loss, Mabes," Wendy said quietly.

Mabel drew up her knees, hugged them, and sighed. "Yeah, it's kinda hard. But this is the one place where I still feel close to him, you know? Thanks for letting me know when he passed away."

Waddles had died peacefully—the vet said—in his sleep the week before the twins were due to return to the Falls. Wendy had broken the news as gently as anyone possibly could have done. Mabel had cried hard, but Soos and Wendy live-streamed the touching funeral service for her. "At least he didn't suffer," Dipper said.

"Yeah. Quiet in his sleep. I guess that's the way to go." Mabel rubbed her eyes, and then leaned forward to pat the grave. "Sleep tight, Waddles. Happy dreams."

Soos and Melody were up and about to greet them and give them great big hugs. Like Waddles, Abuelita had passed quietly away the year before, but it's the cycle of life: Melody and Soos had three kids of their own now to ease the heartbreak.

"You dawgs look so grown up!" Soos exclaimed. "Hey, picture! Everybody get together in front of the counter and let me, like, take a photo! Wendy in the middle! Mabel on the left—no, my left, I mean—Dipper on my right—good. Now say something stupid, dawgs!"

"Something stupid!" they all said.

Soos snapped two exposures. "I'll go and print these up!" he said. "Hey, Hambone, you and Dipper want to work in the Shack this summer? Pick up some money for that big move to college or whatever?"

"Sure," Mabel said, but without her usual verve.

It was up to Dipper to play her normal role: "You betcha!"

They had dinner with the Ramirezes and Wendy—Wendy had moved into Abuelita's old room and sort of served as Soos's chief assistant and also the kids' baby-sitter—and caught up on what had happened here and there. Tambry and Robbie were married and living in San Francisco. Thompson had joined the Army and was overseas, nobody knew where, because his letters home were always censored and no places were mentioned. Lee had a run-in with the CHP and was in jail for six months. Nate was bumming around the California beaches for the summer. Gideon, now sixteen, had finished his second year of high school as class president, Pacifica was in college and dating the son of a U.S. Senator, and so on and so forth.

Mabel still seemed down, and she turned in early. Dipper and Wendy went to sit on the porch and stare at the stars. "How's your love life?" Wendy asked.

Dipper chuckled. "This is the high point."

"Aw, dude!"

"I know, I know. Just friends. But a guy can dream."

The door behind them opened, throwing a rectangle of yellow light across the lawn. Soos stood there, holding something, and shifting from foot to foot. "Uh, sorry, dawgs, but since Stan's kinda out of the game and all, and Ford's off somewheres unknown, I kind of thought you might want to see this. Come on in. First, where's Mabel?"

"Up in the attic," Dipper said. "She's tired from the drive and visiting Waddles's grave—you know."

They went to the dining-room table, and Soos put the photo down. "It may just be, like, a glitch, but—well, you know. So much weird stuff happens here, you never know, you know?"

The air in the room dropped about twenty degrees. Anyway, Dipper got goose pimples.

There they were in the photo, Mabel and Wendy and Dipper, all lean, all nearly the same height, all mugging for the camera.

Except some trick of light and shadow looked like a cowled figure in black standing behind Mabel. And its skeletal hand held—

"A scythe?" Wendy asked. "Creepy as hell!"

Dipper bit his lip. "Grunkle Ford wrote about this in his Journal Five. I remember reading it. I wish I had it here—"

"Would a photocopy do?" Soos asked. "'Cause he keeps duplicates down in his lab."

"A photocopy would be great," Dipper said.

* * *

"It happened in the winter, three years back," Dipper said. "There were, I don't know, portents or something. He doesn't say who it was, but somebody was in danger of being taken by the Grim Reaper one night. Ford used an ancient ritual—yes, here it all is—to bargain with Death and discovered that if he humiliated himself, Death would postpone the visit. I think maybe it was Grunkle Stan or maybe Fiddleford McGucket, but he doesn't say."

"Doesn't matter," Wendy said. "What do we have to do, man?"

"We need floor space. The parlor would be good. And we have to have some chalk. And six candles. And no matter what, we have to be ready to bargain for Mabel's life."

"Let's do it," Wendy said.

"I love—uh, that about you," Dipper told her. "Are there candles in the Shack?"

"Yeah, we sell these phony séance candles in packs of three. No sweat."

"Chalk?"

"Soos's kids have a blackboard in the nursery. I'll go score a stick or two."

"What time is it? We have to finish this diagram before midnight."

"We got like an hour and ten minutes."

The ritual involved tracing a double circle on the floor—reminding both of them of the Zodiac and of Bill Cipher—but instead of oddball symbols like a pine tree and a bag of ice and so on, they had to scribe counterclockwise around the circumference of the outer circle a litany in Hebrew letters, and then, going in the opposite direction around the inner circle, the same phrase, only in Medieval Latin.

"I'm glad you can do this," Wendy said. "I'd screw it up for sure."

They lit the candles, placing them in the proper locations. Then they stood back to back in the center of the inner circle and performed an arcane chant, Wendy stumbling just a little over the unfamiliar syllables. At eleven fifty-five, the lights in the Shack went out, or went away, leaving them in darkness.

A voice as dry as desiccated oak leaves rasped quietly, "Well done. The last time I was summoned was—why, in this very house."

"I know the candles are still burning," Dipper said. "Let us see you."

"Can you stand the shock?"

"Try us," Wendy said.

Death snapped his fingerbones. The ruddy candlelight flooded back. The figure, in a black robe and with black wings outspread, grinned down at them.

"You're tall, dude," Wendy said. "Huh. I expected bat wings, if anything."

"Seven feet four," Death said. "Though I can fit through a keyhole if need be. And my feathered wings are appropriate. I am a sort of angel, after all."

"We're here about my sister, Mabel," Dipper said, his voice shaky.

The skull-faced apparition nodded. "Her time is up tomorrow. She is fated to walk into town but, distracted, to be struck by a logging truck. Nine-seventeen in the morning, by mortal reckoning."

"What do we do to prevent that?" Wendy asked.

"I could take someone else. Her great-uncle could see her and push her out of the way, but be struck by the truck himself."

"That's out," Dipper said. "If you want a substitute, take me—"

"Me!" Wendy said, overriding him.

"But you two have long lives ahead of you," Death said. "It hardly seems fair."

"You—you took Waddles," Dipper said. "Wasn't that enough?"

"A mere pig? For a human life?"

"If you can say that," Wendy told him, "you don't know Mabel well enough to take her! You broke her heart, man!"

"Grunkle Ford wrote that if the petitioner abased himself, you would relent. What about that?"

"I do get bored," Death said. "If the two of you could amuse me—I could see to it that Mabel is five minutes late and crosses the street after the truck has passed."

"No good unless she lives out a normal lifespan after," Wendy said. "No tricks. No letting her get across the street and then falling down a manhole or some biz!"

"I do like your attitude," Death said. "I promise. If you make me laugh, just once, I will see to it that her life-glass is refilled with sand and she will live to a serene and happy old age."

"So what do we do to make you laugh?" Dipper asked. "Tell jokes? Because I'll say up front, I'm not good at that."

"Hmm," Death said. "Well—I have to admit that one human pursuit has always pleased me. What do you know about horse races?"

* * *

Mabel woke up at half-past midnight, dimly aware of odd sounds coming from down below. She got up and, on a hunch, reached for her phone. Then in bare feet, she tiptoed down the splintery old stairs. The sounds, voices and gasps and the clomping of something on the wood floor, came from the parlor where Soos still threw parties and held dances.

She quietly peeked through the open door and choked back a giggle. Hoping there was enough light, she raised the camera and snapped a half-dozen photos.

Wendy, wearing only panties and bra, sat on Dipper's back. He wore only his undershorts and was on all fours. Wendy had to bend her knees and put her feet on his shoulders, but somehow she balanced. She was using his belt like a bridle, and she whapped his bottom from time to time with a ruler.

And she was announcing: "Annnnd coming into the home stretch, it's Dipper by a length! The crowd is going wild! The jockey, Corduroy, is wearing copper-red—"

"Bwah!" Mabel burst out, unable to contain herself. "You two! I knew you had something special going on! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I just didn't realize it would be so_ kinky_! Ooh-la-la!"

She could not see the spectral figure hovering about four feet off the ground, in a sitting posture, knees crossed, in mid-air, though Wendy and Dipper could. Nor could Mabel hear what they could hear: his sepulchral—and yet delighted—"Ha!"

Dipper gasped, "Still gotta cross the finish line!" He crawled faster, and then collapsed, gasping, as he crossed a chalk mark.

"The winner!" Death said, and then he wasn't there any longer.

Dipper went down on his belly, the floor cool against his bare skin. Wendy was sitting on his butt. "Way to go, Dipper!" she said, ruffling his hair. "Woohoo! We make a great team!"

"Roll over, Brobro!" Mabel crowed.

Dipper, dazed and worn-out—they had circled the track for half an hour like that, and Wendy wasn't a lightweight girl—obeyed, and then Wendy was sitting atop him in quite a different place.

Mabel snapped a photo. She said, "I said it before, and I'll say it again: This is fun, what you two have! You guys! You are absolutely made for each other. Dip, I don't expect to see you until tomorrow at breakfast, understand?"

"Huh? Where am I supposed to sleep?" Dipper asked indignantly.

Wendy leaned forward, smiling, and put a finger against his lips. "Dude," she said, "the two of us can figure that one out!" She lay soft against him, kissed his cheek, and whispered into his ear: "Next it's your turn in the saddle."

* * *

The End


	2. Don't Have a Fit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is not in my normal Gravity Falls continuity, but is a story written for Wendip Week 2019 from Prompt 2: "Why are you wearing my clothes?" It's from the summer of 2012 and takes place after "Little Dipper."

**2\. Don't Have a Fit**

**By William Easley**

* * *

**1**

"Dipper," Wendy said in a soft voice, "I want you to take off my shirt."

Blushing a bright red, Dipper said humbly, "Yes, Wendy." His fingers fumbled at the buttons.

The garment dropped to the floor. Wendy smiled. "Nice. Now take off my jeans."

"Are—are you sure?"

"Dude, I want you to do it!"

And so he reached for the zipper.

* * *

**2**

This had all started that morning when Dipper leaped out of the bathtub and banged his head on the shower-curtain rod.

"Mabel!" Dipper yelled, wrapping a towel around himself, "I'm gonna pound you!"

She had ducked out of the bathroom, laughing like a loon. "Not if you can't catch me!"

He couldn't chase her around the Shack while he was, as they say, in the nude. He dashed into their room and grabbed a pair of undershorts, his cargo shorts, and a tee shirt.

And discovered he couldn't force himself into even the undershorts! What would fit his normal twelve-year-old frame would definitely not fit this enlarged version of himself, as tall as Grunkle Stan though not nearly as bulky.

"Dang it, Mabel!"

He yelled loud, and he heard her giggling somewhere downstairs. The Mystery Shack was closed for the day. Grunkle Stan and Soos were off somewhere, out to bag a couple of prize exhibits, so only he, Mabel, and Waddles were there—and she had snuck unto the shower, yanked the curtain aside, and zapped him with the enlarger ray—the one he'd had to rebuild from fresh materials to re-enlarge Soos after that business with Gideon and the mirror maze.

He knotted the towel as best he could and headed downstairs. He felt gawky and awkward and nearly tripped himself up because his feet had become so large. "Mabel! This isn't funny!"

"Yes it is!" she yelled from somewhere in the direction of the gift shop.

"You wouldn't like it if I did this to you!" he shouted, looking into the gift shop.

"You deserve it 'cause you wanted to shrink Waddles!"

"I only suggested it! At the end of the summer, you can't take him home with you—but if he was the size of a guinea pig—"

"That's an insult to his porkliness! You'll have to kiss him and tell him you're sorry!"

"I am not gonna kiss a pig!"

"Then you're not getting downsized, Brobro!"

"Where the heck are you?"

"I'll never tell!" He could still hear her giggling, though. "I think I'll call Grenda and Candy to come over and take a look at you, Dipdop!"

"Mabel, I swear, I'll—" He yanked open the door to the Employees Only room. Empty. He double checked to make sure she wasn't hiding under the table or in one of the lockers—Grunkle Stan had bought a bank of second-hand lockers for employees (Soos and Wendy) to store stuff in. There were only six, but Mabel might be able to hide in one. Especially if she made herself a little smaller.

None of the lockers was locked—none even had a lock. He went through them all—cartons of candy bars for the vending machine in one, cleaning supplies in another, Soos's coveralls and toolboxes in a third, soft drinks in the fourth, and in the fifth—

Wendy's spare clothes!

"I wonder—"

Of course there were no undershorts, but if the rest would fit—

Huh. He got the jeans on—they were really tight, but he got them on—and he discovered they were even a little bit short on him. Wendy liked her flannel shirts roomy, and the red-plaid one fit him well—except, again, the sleeves were a little short, ending three inches above the wrists. "I must be over six feet tall!" he muttered.

No shoes, but he found a clean pair of thick socks in Soos's locker, and with socks, one size fits—not all, but many, and they covered his feet.

Now not only clothed, but foot-padded, he walked quietly out, prowled through the rest of the ground floor, and found no sign of Mabel.

Dang it!

* * *

He hid in Soos's horrible break room—Mabel might happen by—and tried to think like her. It was a little bit like trying to outsmart an earthquake. Mabel's mental processes were like a force of nature.

Maybe . . . she'd be out back, with Waddles!

He tiptoed through the Museum, again slowly, again checking out every exhibit and nook for some sign of a concealed Mabel. He opened the door carefully, slipped down from the porch, and spied Waddles, sprawled out snoozing in the sun. No sign of Mabel.

Back inside, she didn't seem to be in Grunkle Stan's room, or the kitchen, or the parlor, or the storage room where the wax figures had been kept, or any of the closets. Where could she be hiding—

He held his breath. He had just heard the click of the gift-shop door opening.

_Gotcha!_

As stealthily as he could, Dipper tiptoed to the doorway. He heard a noise from behind the counter. He made a sudden rush, saw Mabel bending way over, and charged.

He grabbed her butt—it didn't feel right—and Wendy screamed as they both pitched forward to the floor.

"Wendy!"

She squirmed underneath him. "Dip—Dip—DIPPER? Dude, what happened to you?"

He had pushed her down and lay sprawled on top of her. He scrambled to get up. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Mabel did this!"

He helped her up. She stared at him, her jaw dropping.

"See, there's this crystal that can enlarge or shrink things, and she zapped me with it as I was getting out of the shower, and mmpf!"

Wendy, frowning a little, had reached up—reached up!—to put a finger against his lips. Her head tilted back, a faint smile on her lips, her eyes sort of intrigued and sleepy-looking. "Let me try something," she whispered.

And she put her arms around him. The top of her head came just to his chin. He felt himself hugging her.

"Dude," she said, "your heart's going like two hundred beats a minute. You know, Dip, you still look young, but now you're kind of—impressive!"

"I just want to find Mabel and get back to normal," Dipper said.

With a tilt of her head, she asked, "Are you sure?"

"Well, this is, you know—awkward."

"Wait, are those—why are you wearing my clothes?"

"Because everything I own's too small to fit me now! And Soos and Grunkle Stan are too big for me to wear anything of theirs—I'm really sorry. I'll launder them, I promise! But I have to find Mabel—"

"She's crouched down behind the totem pole outside. I saw her when I came in to look for my phone—I left it down here on the bottom shelf—but then you kinda tackled me."

"I thought you were Mabel. I mistook your buh—you for her. The lights are, um, out, and—"

Wendy shook her head, but at least she was still smiling. "Yeah, well—let me see if I can straighten this mess out."

Wendy went outside and in two minutes marched a penitent-looking Mabel back into the gift shop. "I'm sorry, Dipper," she mumbled. "I guess I got carried away."

"Hand it over," Wendy said. Mabel gave her the flashlight rigged out with the crystal.

"OK," Wendy said. "You go out and play with Waddles or something while Dip gets this squared away. We'll call you when he's back to normal."

"Sorry," Mabel said again, but she went out without protest.

"I'll need to, uh, my clothes are—you know—up in our room."

"So let's go."

* * *

Dipper got everything out and laid it on the bed—fresh underwear, socks, reasonably fresh cargo shorts, tee shirt, vest.

"Can you flash yourself?" Wendy asked.

Dipper looked down on her—man, she was so pretty!—and rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, I don't know. Probably. But Mabel and I did each other."

"OK, so what do I do?"

Dipper showed Wendy how to rotate the crystal. "Now it's in shrink mode. Just hold down the button to shine the light through it and make sure you shine it just on me. But don't shrink me down too much—that's a big headache, getting it just right. Wait, though, Grunkle Stan had us stand against the door frame and marked our heights when we first came—there, see the pencil mark? You can adjust me to that height."

He stood against the door—Wendy smiled. "Man, your head's only like an inch under the opening! You ready?"

He balled his fists and closed his eyes. "Ready."

"Here goes—wait. What happens to my clothes? The ones you're wearing?"

"Uh—they'll shrink with me."

"And if I can't get them back to just the size I like? OK, dude, I gotta tell you—this won't work."

"What do you mean?"

"Dipper," Wendy said in a soft voice, "Take off my shirt."

* * *

The End


	3. Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Right Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When is a door not a door? Not part of my usual continuity, this one-shot was written for Wendip Week 2019, prompt 3: "We have each other now." In it, Dipper is 20, Wendy 23, and they still haven't made a commitment to each other. Rated M for some salty language.

**3\. Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Right Girl**

**By William Easley**

* * *

It was a million-to-one chance, but in Gravity Falls those are a dime a dozen.

And it started down in the bowels of the crashed spaceship, now buried beneath a tall round grassy hill in the center of the Valley. Dipper had recently returned from college—he'd graduated in just three years instead of the standard four. Mabel was still in school and would be for another year, but she had a reliable steady guy and no longer seemed to need Dipper around at every moment.

Wendy was still hanging out at the Shack—now twenty-three, with her hair worn a little shorter but the same old laid-back, fun-loving attitude. Dipper, at twenty, kept thinking this was the time, this was the time, but—well, he'd always needed a push in matters like this.

Unlike Mabel, he hadn't found a steady significant other in college. The genius-level girls seemed too studies-and-career driven, the bright attractive girls thought he was a nerd, the few girls who thought he was funny and appealing . . . weren't the same to him.

And besides, a torch carried long enough becomes an eternal flame.

When Ford asked him if he wanted to go explore a new area of the spaceship, he'd said, "Sure."

And since Mabel wasn't around that summer, he said to Wendy, diffidently, "I don't suppose you'd like to go visit an alien spacecraft with Ford and me."

"Sure, I'll go," Wendy said. "I'm off work today, anyways."

Ford was amenable. "Good," he said. "I'm a little too old to go sliding down ropes the way I used to. Wendy's strength will come in handy."

"Cool!" Wendy exclaimed when they climbed down through the hatch and approached the edge of a hundred-foot drop into darkness.

"At one time," Ford said, "I would have used a magnet gun to hang onto that shaft and let gravity pull me down. It's something of a thrill ride, but my bones are a little too brittle now, so—"

He unrolled a coiled-up rope ladder—except instead of rope, the rungs had been strung on an extremely light, thin, and strong chain of some unknown metal. "I'll go first."

He descended, and a few moments later, Dipper went over the edge. "Hang onto the rungs," he told Wendy. "Not like an ordinary wood or metal ladder. The rungs give you the best grip."

Dipper let himself down into darkness, and in a few seconds he felt the ladder twitch as Wendy, too, started the climb down. By the time Dipper was halfway, Ford had stepped off the bottom and had switched on a lantern that gave a greenish-yellow glow. "It isn't flooded," he called up.

Two summers earlier, after unusual drenching rains, Ford had found a foot of water standing down there. It had evaporated—mysteriously quickly, almost as though the ship had residual heat after uncounted millennia. Now only a thin layer of sediment crunched under Dipper's boots when he hopped off the ladder. He held it steady as Wendy came down. "OK, two more rungs, and then you're like eighteen inches off the ground," he said.

"Thanks, man." Wendy jumped and landed lightly. "So this thing's been here, like, forever?"

"For a minimum of thirty million years, I estimate," Ford said. "Come. Fiddleford and I discovered a closed hatch about three years back, and just this past May I discovered a way of unsealing it. Be careful! We're going into a completely uninvestigated sector of this craft."

At first Dipper couldn't see the hatch at all. It blended almost perfectly into one of the bulkheads of the ship, but then Ford lightly touched the wall there, there, up there, and over there—and the wall panel shimmered out of existence. "Fortunately, it won't close again until after we leave," Ford said.

"Fortunately?" Wendy asked.

"Well—I'm not absolutely certain that the combination would open the hatch from the other side. But so far, it has remained open until I returned to it and exited."

"Good to know," Dipper said.

They stepped through into a corridor that became a helical ramp leading downward. It was like a spiral staircase, but without the stairs. "There may be other hatchways along the walls," Ford told them. "I haven't found any so far, but it's odd that this ramp leads downward for about sixteen meters. I have no idea whether it's passing through an engine room, or storage areas, or something else. Here we are."

"Doesn't look all busted up," Wendy said.

That was true—the other areas of the ship clearly showed the effects of the ancient crash, with things broken and hanging, at least one dead alien body—exoskeleton, anyway—and dead machinery. This room looked as if it were constructed of stainless steel. The roof arched like that of a Quonset hut fifteen feet overhead, and the chamber itself stretched for three times that long, though slightly curved to the right.

Lights with sno visible source flickered on. Nowhere else on the ship was the power working. The light had a strange cast, as if shifted a little farther toward ultra-violet than the light of Earth. It shone on oblong rectangular pillars made of the same metal, chest-high to Dipper, lining both walls. "What are these?" he asked.

"Devices of unknown function," Ford said. "I have no idea why there's so little sign of deterioration in this chamber. Possibly we're in a stasis field that stops or slows the passage of time in some manner. It doesn't seem to work on us—if it did, it might be like the Medieval tales of Fairyland, in which a maiden or a young man might spend one night among the Fairies and discover on returning that a thousand years had passed in the world outside."

"Um, should we be messing with this junk?" Wendy asked.

"No!" Ford said quickly. "Don't touch anything. I plan to investigate thoroughly, but there's just a bare chance that some of this equipment might still be functional. The Shapeshifter's egg was contained in a miniature stasis device that preserved its life, and that—did not work out as well as I had hoped."

"Yeah, dude," Wendy said. "Tell us about it."

"Perhaps later," Ford said. His imperviousness to sarcasm would have shielded Chernobyl. "This way. I don't know for certain, but I think we may be in one section of a torus-shaped chamber that runs around the circumference of the operational center of the ship."

"Like a doughnut, huh?" Wendy asked.

"That's remarkably cogent," Ford agreed. "Yes, as if an enormous doughnut made of some unknown alloy had been sliced into six parts. There, up ahead."

Up ahead the passage ended in a blank wall.

"Is there another hidden hatchway there?" Dipper asked.

"Ah, you anticipate me!" Ford said. "Watch closely." He took out a kind of odd-looking flashlight and shone it at the wall. An eight-foot diameter hole, perfectly circular, shimmered into view, shining a swirling green. Ford switched off the light. Now the wall was simply a steel-like panel.

"What, is it like camouflaged?" Wendy asked.

"I believe this is its normal state. There appears to be a passageway here that is unconventional. Instead of a simple opening, the wall has something very much like a dimensional portal. Except my conjecture is that it merely leads to the next section of the torus." He opened his coat and took a coil of rope from around his waist. "This is where you two come in. I propose to tie this around myself, secure the free end, and trust you two to pull me out should I seem to be in difficulty."

"How are we supposed to secure it?" Dipper asked. "There's nothing to tie it to, except this pillars that you said not to touch!"

Ford took another piece of equipment out. "Magnet gun!" he said, sounding like Mabel announcing, "Grappling hook!" She still had it, by the way. That was, in fact, how she had first met her surprised boyfriend, one midnight at his window on the tenth floor of a huge dorm—long story, maybe another time.

Ford attached the magnet gun to a side wall, then secured the free end of the rope to a carabiner and clicked that to a ring on the gun. "That will hold up to three tons," he said. "I have twenty-five feet of rope, which will let me get approximately twelve feet inside the next part of the chamber. You two stand here and hold onto the rope. If I tug it twice, pull me out as fast as you can."

"Uh—couldn't you send a drone through first?" Dipper asked. "This could be, I don't know, where the aliens kept a zoo of dangerous predators, like the Shapeshifter. You might be walking into a cage!"

"A drone! That is a remarkably good idea!" Ford said. "And I think Fiddleford has something that could do the job. Let me go back to the surface and give him a call. If he has one, he can be here within half an hour or so."

"Shouldn't we all go?" Wendy asked.

"Just to make a telephone call? Hardly necessary," Ford said. "You young people stay here, touch nothing, and I'll return in a few minutes."

His footsteps echoed as he left the chamber and began to climb the spiral ramp.

"Well," Wendy said. "Here we are again, Dipper. Reminds me of the bunker."

"Yeah," he said.

She gave him a puzzled look. "What's wrong? Come on, man. We're still friends." She nudged him playfully.

"That's the trouble," he blurted.

Wendy waited. "Well? Tell me, don't leave me hanging," she said at last.

"Wendy—every time I see you—but we're just friends," Dipper said.

"Is that it?" she asked quietly. "You still want us to be, you know—romantic?"

"I know that ship has sailed," he muttered.

She reached out and took his hands in hers. "Don't be so hasty, man. You know now the age difference doesn't seem so much. We might, I don't know—give it a chance, maybe?"

His heart quickened. "You think?"

"Well, yeah. Of course, I know it's just a summer romance deal. In the fall, you'll go off back to—"

"No," he said. "I graduated. Ford wants me to stay here as his apprentice, and—and I'm gonna."

"So—we'd be like full-time boyfriend-girlfriend," Wendy said.

"Or, um, more than that," Dipper almost whispered.

Wendy chuckled. "Why, Mason Pines! Are you proposing to me?"

Dipper dropped her hands. "I knew you'd laugh at me." He turned away to hide his expression from her.

She put her hands on his shoulders. "I'm not laughing at you, Dipper. But ask me right if you're gonna."

"I don't have a ring or anything," he said.

"Doesn't matter. Ask me anyway."

He turned around, took off his cap, tossed it to the floor, and knelt at her feet, reaching for her hand. "Wendy Corduroy," he said, "will you—"

"Dipper! Your hat!"

He jerked his gaze down. His cap was slipping across the floor, toward the blank wall five feet away. And gaining speed.

He grabbed for it, caught it by the bill, and to his surprise felt it tugging him. He fell forward, moving faster and faster. Wendy grabbed his ankle. "Dude! Let go—"

Everything flashed green for a moment. And then it cleared.

"What happened?" Dipper asked. He had fallen on his belly three or four feet to—a sandy soil.

Wendy got up behind him and looked around. "Dip, I've a feeling we're not in Oregon anymore!"

Indeed it looked that way. They stood in a pleasant countryside. A pink sky arched overhead, with a small bluish sun shining warm. They stood beside a stream that flowed over round silver stones. Trees three hundred feet tall with neon-green leaves surrounded a sort of wild garden where strange fruits grew on vines and bushes. Something sort of like a bird, but with four wings, flew overhead, singing a musical call.

"It's not a hatch, it's a transporter!" Dipper said. "But—where is it?"

They could find no trace of whatever had pulled them here. They searched for it for days.

Well, for a certain definition of "day." The days here seemed to run about nineteen hours. On the other hand, they found the climate warm and comfortable, the air clean and refreshing, the water drinkable, the fruits tasty and without any ill effects.

"I'm so sorry, Wendy," Dipper said on the morning of the tenth day. "I got you into this. I messed up, like always."

"Don't be hard on yourself, Dip," Wendy told him. "You didn't know, man! Come on. I never gave you my answer. Looks like it's gotta be yes."

"Wendy, after I got you stranded like this—no way of getting back home—everyone we know lost to us—"

"We have each other now," Wendy said gently. "And Ford's probably still looking for us, and together you and me can either find some way back or some way to live here. Like Adam and Eve, you know. So yes, Dipper Pines, Wendy Corduroy will marry you. Only I guess we'll have to make up our own vows."

* * *

They had been living as man and wife for about three weeks when the two guys showed up. One wore a white lab coat and looked like a dissipated Einstein, the other was in his late teens and seemed, um, neurotic.

"Who are you?" Dipper asked, jumping up.

"Friend of your—" the older guy belched—"your uncle Stanford. He asked me to see if I could locate you two. Dippy and Wendy, right?"

"He-he-he said 'Dipper,' Rick," the younger one said.

"Yeah, whatever, put on some clothes for God's sake and let's get you home. You know what dimension that is? I bet you don't! You don't look smart enough to—"

"Forty-six apostrophe backslash!" Dipper yelled. "Don't look at my wife until she gets dressed!"

The white-haired guy took a slug from a flask. "You—you—think she's something special?" he asked. "I've seen women that—"

"Rick, now-now-now's not the time!" the younger guy said.

"Shut the hell up, Morty! Just shut the hell up!"

Wendy had pulled on jeans and shirt. Dipper, just in his undershorts, took one step and punched the old guy in the gut. Hard.

He fell to hands and knees and puked, then sprawled back to sit on his butt, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. To Dipper's surprise, the old guy laughed. "You see, Morty? You see? That's the kind of apprentice Stanford has! He's got an apprentice with some guts! Guts, Morty! You know what guts are?"

"These?" Morty asked, kicking Rick in his.

It took the old guy a few minutes to get his breath back. "Oh, you're in for it now, Morty! You just wait. I gotta deal with these clowns first."

"Don't start anything," Dipper warned.

"Jesus, cool your freakin' jets, guy! OK, so you know something about dimensions, color me impressed, woohoo and et cetera. Oof. Let me just sit here for a minute. Morty, get these assholes home. And tell Stanford he owes me! And remember, I—" he belched—"I got a tracker on your ass, so don't try to run out on me!"

"C-come on, folks," the kid said. He led Wendy and Dipper a few yards away. Dipper had got his jeans and shirt on, but carried his shoes and socks. Wendy was wearing his trucker's cap.

"That guy's crazy," Wendy said.

From behind them the old guy yelled, "I heard that!"

Wendy didn't look back but gave him the finger. He laughed.

After they'd gone out of sight of the old man, the kid took out a strange device and projected a circle of swirling green light. "That-that-that's a portal," he said. "Take you anywhere and anytime you want to go. It's set-set to your dimension now, to the place where you came-came through to this-this world. Your uncle's right on the other s-side."

"Who is that guy back there?" Dipper asked. "He's rude, man!"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. See—see, he-he's my grandfather," the kid said miserably. "I-I-I've had about enough of him, but-but he won't leave me alone."

"Run away from home, man," Wendy said.

"He-he'd just find-find me and make my life hell."

Dipper said, "Listen, you really want to get away, see if you can find the Time Baby. Ask him for a job. For some reason I think you'd do real well in his Time Anomaly Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron."

"You—you think?"

"Change your name, too," Wendy said. "Make it harder to find you."

"Try some bland name, nothing that sticks out," Dipper advised. "Blend in with the crowd."

"Um, thanks? B-Better hurry," the kid said. "I don't know how long this por-portal will last."

They stepped through.

"There you are!" Ford said. They stood in the arched, curved chamber again, with no sign of the old guy or the young one—or the green portal. "Thank heavens! You've been missing for hours!"

"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said. "We've been gone for over a month and more!"

"It's not a hatch, dude," Wendy said. "It's a gateway to some other dimension. It's actually kinda nice, but—it's good to be back."

"You were gone for a month?" Ford asked. "Remarkable! I'd surmised the dimensionality angle, and I called a—well, 'friend' may not be the right word, a colleague of mine who has done extensive interdimensional tracking—"

"Yeah, he's a jerk and he says you owe him," Dipper said.

"Yes, yes, I'll do him a favor in return—you were away for more than a month. My word! Was it terrible?"

Wendy giggled. "Not as much as you'd think. The first time was a little hard, but after that—"

Dupper interrupted: "Grunkle Ford, let's cut this short for today, OK?"

"Tomorrow, actually," Ford said. "You left twenty-seven hours and some minutes ago. It's just after eleven on Tuesday now."

Dipper took Wendy's hand. "Good," he said. "The jewelry stores will be open."

* * *

The End


	4. Lost Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After years of bad decisions, an unhappy, lonely Dipper, now a college graduate, is off to track down a troubled Wendy, who's vanished. Not in my usual continuity, this one-shot was written for Wendip Week 2019 in response to prompt 4, "I always kinda knew."

**4\. Lost Girl**

**By William Easley**

* * *

"Keep Portland Weird."

Dipper saw the graffiti all over the place. Portland, Oregon, was proud of its history as an oddball city, a refuge for the different, the offbeat, the strange, the unusual people. It held festivals for no discernible reason. The population sometimes seemed to regard the cops as only part of the landscape, nothing to actually worry about. And though the city seemed to have few rules, it did have limits—do whatever you want, but don't bug other people, dude.

He hadn't visited it often—a few times when he was thirteen and fourteen and then up to the time he'd left for college—but he hadn't been back in four, five years. It was a rainy winter that year. He had just finished everything but his thesis for his master's degree down in Palo Alto. He'd won a fellowship that meant he no longer had to drudge away as a research assistant for old Dr. Poldavy.

He took two months off.

His two Grunkles had bought a house in Gravity Falls. They were getting on in years, but still active. They didn't want to impose on Soos and Melody and their family, so instead of reclaiming the Shack, they lived downtown, a block behind City Hall, in—yep, a log house built by Daniel Corduroy.

"Stay with us, Mason," Grunkle Ford had said when he showed up with suitcase.

"Yeah," Stan said from his armchair. "You can have the attic! Just like old times!"

"Wouldn't be the same," Dipper said with a grin.

"It surely wouldn't," Ford agreed. "The attic has only three feet of space between the floor and the ceiling. What were you thinking, Stanley?"

"It was a joke, Poindexter," Stanley said. "So where's Mabel?"

"This week, off at a clothiers' convention in New York," Dipper said. "She's an entrepreneur."

"Where they chant Harry Reasoner or some deal? A cult?" Stan asked.

"A businesswoman," Ford said patiently. "You remember—she has her own line of clothing for teens. She sells it—"

"Over the Internet, yeah, yeah," Stan muttered. He waggled his eyebrows at Dipper. "He thinks I've gone senile. Nice beard, by the way. You some kind of retro hippie?"

Dipper's full beard wasn't long—about an inch—but he ruffled it and grinned. "Just laziness. My last semester got intense, and it was easier not to shave, so—I ought to get rid of it though."

"I wouldn't," Stan said. "It gives you the illusion of having a chin."

"See, that's why I'm not gonna stay here," Dipper said, but he was laughing.

"Seriously, Mason," Ford said, "we have a spare room. You're welcome to it. If we'd known you were going to visit, we would have tidied—"

"No, thank you both, but I'm not staying in Gravity Falls," Dipper said.

"We got some mysterious happenin's need explaining," Stanley tempted. "People have spotted a giant thingum stalking the woods!"

"One of the waterfalls ran red as blood last month," Ford said. "I still haven't accounted for that."

"Thanks," Dipper said. "But I'm kind of on the trail of something else. I want to rest here for a couple of nights, and then I'm heading over to Portland."

The two elder Pines twins glanced at each other. Stanley cleared his throat. "Uh, Dip, she's been missing for two years. I think even Manly Dan's accepted that she's gone, OK?"

"She wasn't abducted," Dipper said. "She left home."

"Yes, but—well, a single woman alone in the Northwest—you know the tragic history," Ford said.

"I have a small lead," Dipper told him. "I have to follow it through."

Stan tried again: "Kid, you know she got married."

"And divorced, yes," Dipper said. "It doesn't matter. I have to know."

Ford started to say something, but Stanley cut him off: "Let us know if we can help. We won't stand in your way."

* * *

Dipper lay on his side that night, staring out the window. He could just see the water tower, silvered by the moon. Soos would be upset when he learned that Dipper had come back after five years away—and had not visited the Shack.

That hurt Dipper, but he knew if he did walk in that door, he'd look over toward the cashier's counter and his heart would break all over again. Every room in the Shack spoke of Wendy. He saw her ghost everywhere.

"Stupid," he told himself. "Stupid, stupid, stupid." He'd missed his chance right after his junior year in college. She was spending her last summer working in the Shack. The age difference didn't seem so great. Even Mabel had urged him—

But Wendy gave him no signal that he could pick up. And so he'd let it drift—and then that fall he'd heard that she'd taken up with a guy from out of town. That she'd married him.

And that ended it.

Even a year later, when Mabel phoned with the bad news, he still thought it was dead.

She had said quietly, "Wendy and that creep got divorced, Dipper."

"Oh," he'd said.

"Call her."

Thirty seconds went by. Mabel said, "Dipper? You still there?"

"It's too late," he'd managed, and then he hung up.

And another year, and he did not visit the Falls, but he heard about the stormy weather in the Corduroy house, Dan enraged at Wendy's having eloped, at her marrying such a jerk, at her coming back without a penny.

And finally one day she was just . . . gone. And no one had heard from her since.

* * *

When it's rainy in Portland, in January, it's rarely a pounding rain and virtually never a thunderstorm. The rain drifts down lazily, small drops, but it's gelid and slow and sometimes hangs around for hours. That day the high in the city bumped its head against 45 and instantly started down again. It would drop to 38 under cloudy skies, then head up again just as the drizzling rain came back.

It's a myth that Portland is one of the rainiest cities in the U.S. It doesn't even crack the top ten. Most of the rain fails between November and May, and much of it falls as it fell on Dipper Pines—a steady, dreary drizzle coming down from a sky the color of lead.

He felt like a noir-era private eye—he wore a trench coat, with liner, against the cold and the rain, and an Irish wool tweed walking hat. Think Professor Jones, Senior, in that movie about the Holy Grail. Not exactly a tough-guy fedora, but it kept his head dry.

He rented a room in an extended-stay motel—once part of a national chain, now a privately owned building that had been renamed (The Daisy Motel) and that had seen better days. All Dipper asked was a place that was clean, had a bed, and had a shower, and two out of three wasn't all that bad. At least it was cheap.

He spent a week walking the streets, seeing the graffiti, getting his feet wet and otherwise getting nowhere. It was the longest of shots, anyway.

His slim lead had come from, of all places, a campus concert. He hadn't actually attended—he never dated—but a minuscule line of type beneath the lead band's name caught his eye in the campus coffee shop: Also appearing: _Robbie V. and Tambry._

Dipper volunteered to help with the set-up (by walking backstage dressed in a tee shirt and jeans and asking, "What needs to be moved?") and so when the talent showed up two hours before the show, he was able to speak to Robbie and Tambry while the big guns were producing feedback.

"Wendy had this big fight with her dad," Tambry said. Compared to the old days, she was subdued, which meant she was nearly comatose. "Sorry, we've been doing a gig a day and I'm dead for sleep. Anyways, you probably heard her and her so-called husband broke up big time. There's more to it, but Wendy's dad had this grudge and you know they both have tempers."

"Word is that she moved to Portland," Robbie offered. "But I don't know of anybody who knows more than that."

A year-old tip. But Dipper remembered that, once or twice, Wendy had said she hoped to live in Portland someday.

So he made the rounds. Nobody remembered a striking redhead, freckles across her cheeks, hair down to here, sort of laid-back . . . .

No record of her at any of the colleges. He had spent a harrowing day going through police photos and files of runaways and—much worse—Jane Does who always, no matter what skill the photographer had, looked dead, because they were.

Then Dipper took a day off and meditated. What would a girl like Wendy do? What skills did she have?

She was an ace lumberjack.

Very little call for that in a city like Portland.

She'd worked retail.

But only a boss like Stan would have the patience not to fire her.

For her family, she had cooked and cleaned, until she was sick of it.

But—this was Portland. Lots of hotels and motels, and lots of restaurants and coffee shops.

And that led to three soggy days and nights of trudging the streets and patiently, endlessly, asking questions.

In fiction you get detectives like Sherlock Bleeding Holmes, one glance and he knows the suspect's name, address, height, weight, eye and hair color and taste in cravats.

In real life, most cases are solved by days and nights of trudging the streets and patiently, endlessly, asking questions.

* * *

The one thing the 24/7 Cup and Plate had going for it was a sort of catchy name. Aside from that, the location—on a side street that really was an alley with weak ambition—the ambience—it was a lot like a mess tent a few hundred yards behind the front lines in an ill-defined war—and the food—don't ask—left much to be desired.

Gwen Pinelli—name she'd chosen—was tired at 11:49 on a Friday night. She'd just pulled a ten-hour shift, and she was looking forward to going to her room and putting her feet up. Only three customers dawdled at the tables, and they were finished except for paying their checks. Then they did, one, two, three, and she was about to yell and ask Mr. Kali if she could take off early when she realized some jerk had just come in from the rain and sat hunched in the front booth.

With murder smoldering in her heart, she made her way over and, standing at his shoulder, asked, "Menu?"

The guy shook his head—he didn't even take off his hat. "Just coffee."

"Just coffee." Great, maybe a fifty-cent tip.

Whatever. Serve him and get rid of him. She went back and poured a cup and resisted the temptation to spit in it. But when she put it on the table, she asked with forced politeness, "Would you please mind paying the check now? I'm off in—" she glanced at the clock. "—in one minute ago, actually."

"Bring another cup and I'll pay. Fresh cup. New cup."

She did, setting it on the table at his elbow. "OK, that'll be—"

He interrupted: "Now go clock out and come here and sit down and have some coffee with me." He looked up for the first time.

She said, "I don't pick up that easy, guy."

"Please, Wendy. Have some coffee with me."

Ice water filled her veins just for a second. It was all she could do not to collapse right then and there, right on the stained, cracked linoleum checkerboard-tile floor. "Dipper?" she whispered.

* * *

". . . so I didn't have anywhere to go," she finished miserably. "I keep thinking I should move on, but—I just barely survive. I can't save a dime with the salary and tips I get here."

"Where are you living?" Dipper asked. He'd been prepared for anything, he thought, but this too-thin, exhausted woman with short black hair was more than he'd expected.

She grimaced. "Room in a boarding house. I, uh—I can't have visitors."

"I've got a room at the Daisy," he said. "It's not much."

She grinned and for a moment looked like her old self. "You askin' me to shack up?"

"To come and talk," he said. When she hesitated, he said gently, "This is me, Wendy. You said if I ever stopped being your friend—"

"I'd throw myself in the Bottomless Pit," she whispered.

"I haven't stopped."

* * *

They talked the night through. Much of what she told him was bitter. Both of them shed tears. She spoke of her terrible mistake, whose name was Terry Cooglin. "I thought he was an OK guy," she said. "Somebody to get me out of Gravity Falls. Didn't know he was crazy."

There had been fights. There had been injuries. She showed him her upper teeth, right incisor and eye tooth. "This is a bridge," she said. "He punched me one night."

"I'd kill him," Dipper told her. "But he's already dead."

Wendy had not heard, so he summed up what he'd learned. With two other guys, Terry had tried to rob a convenience store in Mobile, Alabama. The robbery went bad, segued into a nasty hostage situation and a shoot-out, and when it was over, all three robbers lay dead of gunshot wounds. "It happened last July," he said. "I found that out when I first started trying to find you. That fall I ran into Tambry and Robbie and heard you possibly were in Portland. Terry's out of your life, Wendy."

"I wish I could be sad," Wendy said.

He sat with his arm around her waist. The crummy little room had no chairs, so they perched on the edge of the bed. But they never lay down. Dipper smoothed her hair and said quietly, "It's time for you to get out of here."

"Too late," she said.

"No. I want to ask—"

"There was a baby, too," she said abruptly, and then she cried with great racking sobs, and he held her until she could gasp out the story. She had been three months along. Terry, who claimed to be a master of kung fu, had blown up at her about something trivial—she couldn't even remember what—and had kicked her in the stomach. She lost the baby.

"It wasn't your fault," Dipper told her gently.

"I feel like it was."

"Does it mean you can't have babies?"

She shook her head. "Just—I just lost the little girl."

"It's time for you to come home," he said.

This time she nodded.

She didn't owe any money to her landlady. She felt like she should give her notice to Mr. Kali. A couple of phone calls took care of both.

After their sleepless night, they walked out into a morning with the sun beginning to peek through. "Let's go get your things," Dipper said as he opened the passenger door of his car for her.

Wendy seemed to shrink inside herself as they drove back to Gravity Falls. She was subdued and nervous, but Grunkle Stan hugged her and said gruffly, "Welcome home, kid. We gotta fatten you up."

Dipper called Manly Dan. He came in, weeping, and hugged Wendy, too. "I'm sorry I blowed up," he said. "I was wrong."

"Me, too," she gasped. When Manly Dan hugs someone, they know they've been hugged.

After the two of them talked, after Dan had left, Dipper then took Wendy out to their spot—the glade where Stan had always had campfires when he was in the mood for stories. She perched like a timid bird on the log, but then listened to birdsong and woodpecker drum accompaniment and finally sighed and looked more like her old, confident self.

"OK," he said. "I've got a ring. And I'm going to ask you. And you're going to say—"

"Dipper," she whispered.

"I just want to tell you a few things first," Dipper said. "I'm a grad student with a year to go before I graduate. I don't have a job lined up. For now, I've got an apartment big enough for both of us. With my fellowship, we can make it if we live cheap. From then on, we do the best we can. I can't promise you anything much. I can only say that together we can face everything and overcome anything. I'm sorry I was so chicken, but—I love you, Wendy. I always have. I always will. Please marry me."

"I guess I have to," she said.

"No," he told her. "I'm no knight in shining armor. You made some crappy decisions, but so did I. I should have been here for you, and I wasn't, because I've been a coward. We're both kind of broken. But we're better together."

"Dipper, I'll marry you," she said.

They embraced and kissed. "You'll have to shave that beard," she murmured.

"You'll have to stop coloring your hair black," he said.

"Deal," she agreed. "Dipper, I love you. I have for years, but—I didn't think you were interested any longer."

"I've loved you since day one," Dipper said. "But we'd agreed to be friends."

"Bad timing."

"It's all right now," he told her. "When I came looking for you—I was sure I would find you. That's why I'd saved up for the ring. Something told me that when I asked you to marry me, you'd say yes. I guess—well, I guess I always kinda knew."

* * *

The End


	5. Confessions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wendy, Dipper, and Mabel explore a mystical cave, and wouldn't ya know it, they get trapped. This is not in my usual Gravity Falls continuity, but was written for Wendip Week 2019 from Prompt 5, "You mean a lot to me, man." In it, Mabel and Dipper are fifteen, Wendy eighteen.

**5\. Confessions**

**By William Easley**

* * *

Mabel pounded on the door with both fists. "Let us out of here! Right now!"

"Save your breath," Dipper warned. "I don't think we'll get out by pounding and yelling. Wendy, what did you find?"

"Stone walls, Dip," she said, returning through the gloom with their only flashlight. "I think we're stuck here unless somebody's got dynamite on them."

Mabel went through her sweater. "Darn it, I know I had some earlier!"

"Let's calm down," Dipper said. "We got in here by speaking a magic word. There must be a different magic word to get us out again. Or something."

That summer Dipper and Mabel were fifteen, Wendy eighteen. Stanford now had an apartment in the Shack basement, along with his labs, and he was continuing his efforts to explore and understand the mysteries of Gravity Falls. Stanley, officially retired, still dropped in at the Shack every single day to help Soos sell merch to the marks. And Wendy still worked at the Shack, well, just because it was something to do in the summer and she was still trying to make up her mind what she wanted to do now that she had just graduated from high school. Or so she said.

"Let's look at the map," Dipper said. He'd photocopied it from Stanford's notes—the twins' earnest but sometimes absent-minded Grunkle had marked it "To be explored when time permits."

However, he had made that note more than a year earlier and, typical Stanford, had apparently forgotten it. Mabel had discovered it under a tall pile of books and papers on Stanford's desk and had come up with the bright idea: "Let's go explore this as Grunkle Ford's birthday present!"

Dipper thought that was cool. They'd covered Grunkle Stan—a pair of magic money pants. Really, it's astounding what you can find on eBay. That present was wrapped and ready to give to Stanley on June 15—tomorrow, in fact.

Dipper spread out the photocopy on the floor of the cave and shined the flashlight on it. It had a thumbnail drawing in the upper left corner: CAVERN OPENING, NORTH BANK OF RUNNING RIVER. The rest of the page was covered with a ground plan of the cavern's interior—roughly circular, with annotations in Ford's small, neat handwriting: DON'T WALK BENEATH STALACTITES, THEY DETACH. SMALL DRIPPING SPRING HERE, WATER MAKES YOUR FEET SWELL DO NOT DRINK. And in the uttermost recess of the cavern, an X, and beside it SECRET PASSAGEWAY? MAGICALLY SEALED? EXPLORE! CONJECTURE: REQUIRES CHARM OF OPENING.

That morning Wendy, who knew the woods better than anybody except maybe her dad, led them to the Running River, which burbled over round rocks, and they followed its course until they found the cavern opening. "Been here before," she said, "but never noticed the cave. Looks more like a scooped-out place where a humongous boulder fell out."

But—they took off shoes and socks and rolled up their jeans and waded through the icy water—when they got close to it, they could see that actually a crack in the stone way to the right opened into the cavern. They had cautiously entered, had avoided the stalactites, the spring, the vortex of vertigo, and a few other perils, and had come at last to the place marked X.

It did look like a sealed-up passageway—an arch with an almost smooth stone face beneath it. When they put their palms against it, they could all feel a strange vibration that the other cave walls did not have.

"Open Sesame!" Mabel tried, but nothing happened. So they went through a whole list of spells that might open a passage way, including "Open up!" "Alakazam!" "Abracadabra!" and "Hocus Pocus!"

None of those worked, so they tried more desperate measures. Wendy yelled, "By the Power of Grayskull!"

Dipper's turn: "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!"

Mabel punched his shoulder. "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo? Are you crazy, Broseph? That's for like dresses and pumpkins!"

"It was all I could think of," Dipper said. "You come up with something better, then!"

"OK, I will!" Mabel crossed her arms and stared at the wall as though daring it to open. "This is the real deal. Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho!"

"Didn't seem to work," Dipper said.

Wendy and Mabel took turns yelling other guesses as, with the light, Dipper prowled around the edge of the shallow arch. He tried to concentrate enough to shut out the girls' voices: "Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee!" and "Sim Sala Bim!" and the like.

A little above eye level, Dipper saw a layer of caked dry mud. He scraped it and beneath it he saw what might have been carved letters. "This may help!" he said above Mabel's shouted, "Klaatu barada nikto!"

They came over. "What does it say, dude?" Wendy asked.

Dipper read haltingly: _"Praetorium loqui veritatem intrare._"

"Russian?" Mabel grumbled. "Make it hard, why don't you, stupid cave!"

"It's Latin," Dipper said. "Um, let me see: Praetorium . . . means, uh, like, courtroom, hall of justice, something like that. The rest—speak the truth and enter?"

"I hate you, stupid trick door!" Mabel yelled. "That doesn't work, either."

"Maybe it's like in _Lord of the Rings,_" Wendy suggested. "You just had to say 'friend' and the cave unsealed."

"You read _Lord of the Rings?_" Dipper asked, surprised.

"Well, yeah. Me and my dad and brothers were off on this survival camp trip, which I hated, and I asked if I could finish reading a book before going out and getting firewood and trapping food and all the stuff I did better than them already, and Dad said fine, and that was the biggest book I could check out of the library—I liked it pretty well, except the women characters were—"

"So boring," Mabel pronounced, dropping to the cave floor and sitting there looking glum.

"I get it," Dipper said. "OK, let me try this. Speak the truth, speak the truth—um, veri—something. Veritas!"

"Hey!" Mabel said, jumping up. With no fuss, the stone in the arch vanished, and they all walked through.

And discovered the opening now was sealed on the far side—and, growing desperate they had spent more than an hour trying to find some way out.

No, "Veritas" didn't work on this side.

"We are so gonna miss our Grunkles' birthday!" Mabel complained.

"Yeah, and we'll run out of air eventually too!" Dipper said.

"Worry about the important stuff first, though," Mabel told him. "Their birthday!"

Wendy sat with her legs crossed in a semi-lotus position, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her fist. "OK, let's think our way out. The first word, you say it's like courtroom?"

"Something like that, I think," Dipper said.

"So . . . what if this was a place where in ancient times they brought people to try for crimes? Or to testify? What if we have to tell the truth to get out?"

"About what?" Mabel asked.

"Um—each other?" Wendy asked. "What else is there?"

"Might as well try," Mabel said. "Um. Wendy, I love you like the big sister I wish I had! Dipper, I, um—I tease you too much."

Dipper had his hand against the stone. "Hey! It just vibrated a little! I think we're onto something."

"So you try," Mabel said.

Dipper bit his lip. "Mabel, you drive me crazy sometimes, but you're funny and, um, and adorable. Wendy—" he sighed. "Wendy, I still have a huge crush on you." This time they all heard a faint creaking and some small stones pattered to the floor.

"It's working!" Mabel said. "Wendy, go, go, go!"

"All right," Wendy said. "Mabel, you're the funniest girl I've ever met and I love you like a little sister. Dipper, you mean a lot to me, man."

They heard a deep, foreboding _boom!_

"Uh—I think we got rejected," Dipper said.

"I hear water!" Mabel exclaimed.

Dipper turned the flashlight up. Water had begun to flow in from the ceiling. Already the far side of the cave stood a few inches deep. "Is it gonna drown us?" he asked.

"Maybe that's the punishment for not telling the truth," Mabel said. "Let me go again! Wendy, I—sometimes I'm jealous 'cause you've had so many boyfriends! Dipper, I wish you'd be more self-confident around girls! Oh, my God, it's pouring in! Dipper, quick!"

"OK, OK," Dipper said. The water had flowed across the floor and was a half-inch deep. No, a full inch. The cave was filling fast. "Um, Mabel, I get envious of how easy you can make friends! Wendy, I—if we're going to die, I'd love to kiss you just once!"

"Aw, dude!" Wendy said. "Mabel! Sometimes you need to think twice before doing crazy things, OK? Dipper—you—you mean a lot—" She closed her eyes and then in a rush, said, "OK, the truth is I guess I'm kinda in love with you now!"

The stone vanished, they rushed through, and a moment later they heard the gush of water behind them shut off.

"You two are in love!" Mabel said when she got her breath back.

"Did you really mean that, Wendy?" Dipper asked.

"Come on," she said, and she led them back out into the open air. They crossed the stream and then hiked through the woods until they got to a spot where a tree had fallen a few years earlier, from the look of it. Wendy sat on it, patted the log beside her and said, "Mabel, here." Then on the other side, "Dipper, you here."

They sat on either side of her. She took a deep breath. "I'm still too old for you," she said softly. "Eighteen-year-old dating a fifteen-year-old, and this is a small town, people would gossip their heads off. You understand that?"

"Yeah," Dipper admitted. "But—I can't help what I feel, Wendy. I'm sorry, I would if I could—"

"Dude," she said softly. "I don't want you to change the way you feel, understand? Like I said, I guess I'm kinda in love with you."

"So—but the age thing—" he said.

"Won't matter so much if what we feel is real. Not in a couple years, anyhow. Can we wait? Can we hold out, you know?"

"We can try," Dipper said. "But—I love you, Wendy."

She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his, her cheeks glowing, her green eyes closed, her voice sweet and soft: "I love you, Dipper."

Half a minute went by with the wind stirring the leaves overhead and birds chirping and trilling.

"Go ahead, you two!" Mabel said. "Kiss!"

They did. When another half minute passed, Mabel said, "Enough. Back to the Shack! We've got more thinking to do, 'cause we got a big problem—now that we have Grunkle Ford's present, how the heck do we wrap it?"

* * *

The End


	6. Face the Music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is not in my normal Gravity Falls continuity, but is a story written for Wendip Week 2019 from Prompt 6, "Wendy, you're the coolest person I know." In this one, Wendy and Dipper face a rough session with Manly Dan . . . Dipper's seventeen, Wendy twenty.

**6\. Face the Music**

**By William Easley**

* * *

"I hear him," Wendy said.

"I'm not sure about this," Dipper said.

Wendy gave him a sick kind of glance. "Me, neither. But I don't think Dad would actually kill either of us. On the other hand, we might be lookin' at a long stay in the hospital. Maybe we could be roommates in traction."

They stood for a minute, hearing the steady chop of a woodsman's axe. Then Dan shouted, "Timber!" so loud that even the woodpeckers stopped drumming. They heard the crash of a tall tree not so very far ahead, and a frightened rabbit zoomed past them without even noticing the two.

"Guess we'd better find him before he starts on another tree," Wendy said. She took Dipper's hand. "We're together in this, man. We gotta have each other's back."

Dipper nodded and tried to swallow a cold lump that felt as big as a fist. Fist. Why did he have to think of that right now?

They soon smelled the sharp, oddly sweet scent of Douglas fir, and then they heard a few final, nearly casual, whacks of an axe as Manly Dan finished chopping through the last tough fibers holding trunk to stump.

Wendy squeezed Dipper's hand. "Dad!" she yelled.

Dan straightened up, looking back over his shoulder. "Baby girl! Dipper! You two come to work for a change?"

"No," Wendy said. "To have a talk."

"Time for a break anyhow," Dan said. "Them stumps over there's dry. We can set on them."

When Dan chopped a tree, he finished the stump with an axe so it looked as if it had been sawn—no lethal splinters. He one-handedly sank his ax-head up to the haft in one of the stumps and said, "Set and talk. Half an hour, then I got to get back to work. What's so important?"

Dipper let Wendy sit closest to her dad. "Dipper's got something he has to tell you," she said. "Now, don't get mad."

"What is it?" Dan rumbled, already looking enraged.

"Sir—" Dipper's voice came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat. "Uh, sir, Wendy and I have been dating for five years now—"

"That can't be right. You ain't but about fourteen, and you didn't even come to Gravity Falls—"

"Sir," Dipper said, "I'll be eighteen in ten days."

"Huh. Lost track of time, I guess. Well. Happy birthday. Is that all?"

"Wendy and I want to get married," Dipper said in a rush.

Dan stared at him. "When you're old enough," he said with an air of finality.

"No, Dad," Wendy said. "Now. This week. It's—it's urgent."

"Listen, girl, I know teens have urges and everything—"

"Not urges, sir," Dipper said. "Urgent. We, uh, we really need to get married." Dan scowled a question at him. In a trembling voice, Dipper said, "We—we _have_ to get married. Sir."

"Look," Dan said, his expression and bearing reminding Dipper of a volcano on the verge of a mighty explosion, "there ain't no hurry. You two are young. When you get to the right age—"

"Dad," Wendy said, "I'm going to have a baby."

He stared at her as if she'd just announced she was actually an alien from Venus.

"My—my baby," Dipper said. "Sir."

"What?"

Dipper thought he was prepared for anything, but that quiet question nearly made him faint. It meant Dan was saving up his anger for action.

"It just happened," Wendy said.

"GARRHHH!" Dan sprang up. Dipper tensed to run. Dan grabbed a three-year-old fir and ripped it out of the ground. He held the crown in his right hand, ran his left down the trunk, ripping off all the branches. He held the bare trunk horizontally and bit through it. He spat splinters at a log so hard that they embedded themselves in the wood. From the earth where he'd uprooted the tree, he grabbed a basalt stone the size of a loaf of bread. Dipper half expected him to turn green and yell "DAN SMASH!" But he stayed pink, didn't yell, and, holding the stone in both hands, he smacked it against his forehead, shattering it to bits. The rock, not his forehead. That was fine.

He stomped around in a circle. He seized his axe, wrenched it free of the stump, and then lit into the stump, windmilling the axe so it looked like a buzz saw. Splinters flew. In less than a minute, the stump was just a fragrant pile of fragments. Dan dropped the axe, walked over to a mature redwood, and punched it. The tree fell over.

"They got shallow roots anyway," Wendy whispered to a pale Dipper.

A hawk was circling hundreds of feet above. Dan pointed at it and screamed, "Die!"

The hawk tumbled from the sky. It wasn't actually dead, but stunned, and recovered just in time to fly away in terror just above the treetops.

Then Dan turned, muscles bulging, veins throbbing in his forehead. His teeth clenched, his bloodshot eyes almost popping, he stalked up to Dipper and glared down. "So!" he thundered. "You take responsibility, do you? You gonna marry my baby girl and support her and your kid?"

Dipper couldn't even talk, but he nodded like a bobblehead.

Dan sighed like a Macy's balloon deflating. "I guess I gotta accept it." Then he bellowed, "But I don't have to **LIKE IT**!"

"Are you through?" Wendy asked. "Have you got your mad out?"

Dan nodded. "But I ain't shakin' hands! I'll rip his arm out if I do!"

"Come with us, then."

They probably should have let Dan go first. They threaded their way through trees and underbrush back to the logging road. Dan came behind them, pushing brush and trees out of his way, leaving behind a rugged path.

"Here we go," Wendy said. "OK, Dad, there's your truck."

Dan's jaw dropped as he stared at the battered green pick-up. "What in the hell—'scuse me, baby girl—happened to it?"

Dipper said, "I was driving, and Deputy Durland ran a red light and T-boned the driver's side. The door won't open, the side window and the back windshield are both broken out, and I don't know if the frame's OK. It's drivable, though, and I promise, I'll work until I pay off the damages—"

"You let my pregnant daughter get caught in a **CAR WRECK**?"

"Dad," Wendy said, "First of all, we both had our seat belts on. Second, I'm not pregnant."

"I'm gonna take you to the hospital an' have you checked out, an' if that baby's been hurt—wait, what? You ain't pregnant?"

"Nope," Wendy said. "Dipper and me haven't been doing anything that would make me pregnant, if you get my drift. It's just we wanted to tell you about the truck and I figured if you blew off all your steam on something that would really make you mad—"

Dan laughed. "Aw, hell!" he said. "OK, was Durland a-sounding his siren?" He pronounced it "sigh-REEN."

"He wasn't on duty," Dipper said. "He was in his own car. He ran the red light on Center at Redwood. We have witnesses."

"He wasn't hurt bad," Wendy added. "They said at the hospital he had bruises and maybe some brain damage, so nothing that will matter. His Jeep was totaled, and it looks like a couple-three thousand in damages to the truck."

"Shoot, my insurance and his'll cover it. You two had me goin'! Git outa here and take the truck to Vince at the shop, see what he says. And Wendy, you call Boyd at the insurance—"

"Already done," Wendy said. "He told me the same thing, have Vince check it and send him an estimate. We good?"

"Yeah," Dan said with a grin. "You two! You and your tall tales really had me a-goin'." He paused and then, in a strange, sad voice, asked, "So—not going to be a grandbaby, then?"

Wendy stood on tiptoe, he leaned down, and she kissed his cheek. "Not this time," she said. "Someday. After Dip and me are properly married."

He nodded, and Dipper thought he glimpsed tears in the big man's eyes. "Let a man git back to work," he said in a gruff voice. "Take that truck in to the shop, and tell Vince I don't want nothing just tacked on, mind! Repairs and that's it!"

"Yes, sir," Dipper said.

After Dan had followed his own path back to the logging site, Wendy said, "You still look a little shook. Want me to drive?"

"Please," he said.

They both had to get in on the passenger side. Wendy said, "Seat belt!"

Dipper fumbled his and then latched it. "OK." As she turned the somewhat crumpled truck around, he said, "I didn't think it would work. But you pulled it off. Thanks, Wendy. You're the coolest person I know."

"I know, dude," she said. "Tell me about it later. In bed."

* * *

The End


	7. If You're Freaky and You Know It . . .

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While on Spring Break of their senior year, Dipper and Mabel ponder ways of earning money for college. And Wendy has a suggestion. Not in my usual GF continuity, this one-shot was written for Wendip Week 2019 from Prompt 7, "I guess we're both freaks."

**If You're Freaky and You Know It . . .**

**By William Easley**

* * *

_Yeah, when we were kids, Poindexter was the brilliant one in the family. Me, I was good for a laugh, you know. Always up to somethin'. And most of the time, me and Ford hung out together. See, he was so brainy, he didn't have many friends. Any friends, I guess._

_There was the deal of his hands, too, you know. Twelve fingers! Jeeze, the names the kids called him. "Freak" was about the mildest. But him and me, we were inseparable, at least up till we were seniors in high school. Then—but you know how it all blew up. Anyways, after he had his little accident and vanished off the face of the Earth, and I had to discover some way, any way, of finding him and bringin' him back, that's when I learned I could scam people._

_Naw, that's not right. Let me rephrase that. Not scam. Entertain people. Fool 'em but make 'em laugh at bein' fooled! Yeah, that's it. Like a magician. Not everybody can do that, you know. Takes a special kind of gift. A warped mind don't hurt, either! Yeah, long before I fixed that Portal—and that took lots of doin', believe me, I had to practically give myself a college education to learn how—long time before I finished that little job, I realized that Brainiac and me had something in common. We're both freaks!_

* * *

Mabel switched off the voice recorder. "Now," she said, "how do I put that in my scholarship application essay and not give away our Grunkles' biggest secrets?"

"That's a mystery," Dipper said.

It was spring break of their senior year, and the twins had persuaded their parents to let them drive up to Gravity Falls as a sort of retreat. They'd received acceptances from their colleges of choice already, but now both of them were scrambling to pick up scholarships to ease the burden of loans. Mabel's college awarded scholarships in creativity—but part of the application was to write an essay, and her choice of topic was "My most interesting relative."

"Yeah, yeah," Mabel grumbled. "Thanks for telling me. I wouldn't have guessed! There must be some way of describing Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford without spilling the paranormal beans! Huh. Do you suppose those were the kind of beans Jack swapped the cow for?"

"No idea," Dipper said.

"What are you getting all dressed up for?" Mabel asked suspiciously. "As if I couldn't guess! You're not working on scholarship applications at all! You got a date with Wendy!"

"Not a date date," Dipper corrected. "We're doing the same thing you are—trying to figure out ways of earning a little extra cash for college."

"If you find any, let me know," Mabel muttered. "Let me see: My Freaky Family. How's that sound?"

"Like a Disney TV show," Dipper said.

"Huh. Maybe I can go into the television industry. Maybe I don't even need college!"

"Don't count on that," Dipper said. "All the best TV people go to CalArts. See you later!"

"Hey, Dip, if you run into Blendin Blandin, ask him if I can borrow his time tape. I'm gonna need like an extra month to figure out how to write this darned essay."

"We haven't seen him for six years, but if Wendy and I run across him, I'll remember." A horn honked outside the Shack. "Gotta run!"

* * *

Dipper's own choice of college was CalTech—similar to Mabel's only in that they both began with "Cal." His was actually much more expensive than hers. Their parents were helping, but—well, there was just so much money in the Pines family budget, and though both kids had college savings accounts, it was going to be a hard push to make that last for four whole years.

Wendy kissed him as he got into the car. "Tell me about your idea," he said.

"Well, dude, it's really more my dad's idea," she said. "I'll show you."

She drove them to a little crossroads place—Gravity Falls was the only town of any size (and it was small) in the whole Valley, but the village of Glen Rapids also counted as an unincorporated village. Technically, it wasn't inside the Valley or in the weirdness field—just barely outside both, though barely inside Roadkill County, and a vacation community for visitors to the Willamette National Forest.

Wendy pulled up in front of a run-down looking cottage. "Here we go, Dip. Let's go see our dream house."

More like nightmare house, he thought. The place must have stood vacant for years. The windows facing away from the highway had all been boarded up. The ones facing forward were bleared with dirt, many panes cracked or broken. Streaks on the walls showed that the roof had leaked. Vandals or thieves had ripped copper wiring right out of the walls.

"It's a mess," he told her after they had gone through the six rooms—living room, kitchen/dinette, two bedrooms, den, and spare room, with one and a half bathrooms snugged in.

"That's the beauty part," Wendy said. "The worse it is, the cheaper it is. Dad can pick this up for only a couple thousand, 'cause the inspectors thought that the only thing that would improve it would be tearing it down."

"Two thousand?" Dipper asked. "Really?"

"Yeah, man. 'Cause it's not only run-down ugly, it's haunted."

"So this summer, you and I—"

"Will get rid of the ghost—that's your job—and then we'll completely remodel everything. Dad will supply the materials, we'll put in the labor. Dad's got two guys for the plumbing and wiring, so that's not on us. You and me—you ever reshingled a roof?"

"Half of the Shack roof," Dipper said, remembering. "In a hundred and five degree heat!"

"Ever put in drywall?"

"What's drywall?"

Wendy laughed and punched his shoulder. "You'll learn! And I know you can paint!"

"Not glitter paint, I hope!" Dipper said. He remembered when Grunkle Stan had them all up on the roof turning the Mystery Shack sign into a hot-pink glitterfest.

"Don't think so. OK, so there's some bad flooring we'll replace. There's some structural repairs to be done to joists. Once we get the attic up to code, we'll put in some insulation. Job will take all summer—"

"Just you and me?"

"You, me, and the ghost," Wendy said. "Dad will sell the place—he's done a bunch of these for a guy who owns lots of rental properties—for at least a hundred thou. He'll clear at least fifty thousand profit, and he'll split that with us fifty-fifty."

"You mean fifty, twenty-five, twenty-five," Dipper said.

"Well—he's probably gonna notice when we get married, and anyway it comes out the same. So—you game for earning part of your tuition with some hard work?"

They walked through again, inspecting. Dipper pointed out sections of the framing damaged by leaks. Wendy told him what would have to be done to fix them. They went up to the attic—a mess. Squirrels had colonized it. "We'll have to seal up all the cracks and make sure they can't get in the walls and come up that way."

By the time they finished their tour—four hours—Dipper said, "Let's give it a shot."

"That's my man!" Wendy said.

He glowed.

But there was one more thing . . . .

* * *

That night after dark, Dipper and Wendy sat on the bare floor in the cottage living room, a candle in a holder providing the only light. Dipper said, "OK, ghost, we know you're here. We could do some stupid incantation, but we don't need that, do we? Appear to us and let's just talk."

"Don't be afraid, dude!" Wendy added.

"Look at the candle," Dipper said.

It burned with a blue flame.

"That a sign of ghosts?"

"Classic," Dipper said. He raised his voice: "Where are you?"

Something scratched in the walls. Then heavy footsteps tromped across the attic. Something screamed like a little girl in terror.

Everything fell silent. "Pretty good," Dipper said. "But really, just manifest and let's talk."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then Wendy said, "Dude, behind you, in the doorway to the kitchen."

Dipper swiveled partway around. Squinting, he wondered if it was just a trick of the candle flame and shadows—no, a dark mass was rising from the floor, a hulking sort of form. Two red sparks flickered. Eyes. "Get out!" barked a voice. If a gorilla could speak, it would sound like that.

"Don't be like that," Dipper said. "Come on. Do you like this house being such a messy wreck?"

Seconds passed.

Then—"Oh, very well."

A slight, transparent figure formed, glowing a pale blue. "You live people are just so—so irritating!" the ghostly man said. "Coming into my house—"

"Dude, sorry to break this to you, but the house is derelict," Wendy said. "You're dead."

"I know." Now that he had formed, he was not a fearsome apparition at all—a short, slight, bald man with a receding chin and round glasses and wearing trousers, a shirt with no tie, and a vest.

"Come on in," Dipper said kindly. "Let's just have a friendly talk. What's your name?"

"You wouldn't believe it."

"Try us," Wendy said.

The ghost sighed a ghostly sighed. "Casper," he said. "Casper McQuillock. Go ahead, make a joke about Casper the ghost."

"Just a coincidence," Dipper said. "Nothing to joke about. Uh, when did you—pass over?"

"Over what? Oh, you mean when did I die? I'm not sure. Time is so different for the living impaired."

"What's the last big news item you remember?" Wendy prompted.

"Um—Truman beat Dewey. I think that was it. Yes, I'm positive. I had my fatal stroke a few days later. I regret that, because I'm a Democrat."

Dipper said, "So—I think that was like 1947 or 48? You've been here a long time!"

"Yes," the little man said sadly. "I died one morning while getting dressed in the next room over. It was our bedroom."

"You were married!" Wendy exclaimed.

"Ruby Nelle," Mr. McQuillock said, his voiced ripe with regret and yearning. "She died about a year before I did. I prayed we'd meet again, but I guess I wasn't good enough. She's in Heaven, I hope, and here I am stuck in Oregon."

"You can go join her," Dipper said.

"I don't know how."

"This is Dipper, and I'm Wendy," she said. "Listen to him. He's young, but he knows all about ghosts."

"You probably know more than I do," Mr. McQuillock murmured. "I'm a failure as a ghost. I don't even know why I'm still here."

"Usually," Dipper said, "it's because a person's left something unfinished."

"I can't think what that would be," the ghost said. "Ruby Nelle and I always wanted to have children, but we couldn't, and now we're both beyond that. Couldn't be my lacking a family. Still, it's a shame. I built this house all by myself so we'd have a place to raise a family—and we only had each other."

"You built the house?" Wendy asked. "You did a good job, Mr. McQ! I mean, it's in bad shape, but I can tell you put a lot of work into it. A lot of love."

"I loved Ruby Nelle very much." After a moment, he added, "Do you suppose—it's silly, but—oh, never mind."

"No, what?" Dipper asked.

"Well—the room at the back of the house, adjoining our bedroom. It was supposed to be for our children. Or child. But the day we found out for sure that we couldn't have children—I just put away my tools. That's the one room I never finished."

Wendy said, "Oh, that's so sad." She thought for a moment. "Listen—let us finish it for you! We're gonna fix the place up this summer—"

"What season is it now?"

"Spring," Dipper said. He told him the year.

"I've wasted so much time," Mr. McQuillock said. "I've been a ghost longer than I was alive. I had no idea."

"Think about finishing up that children's room," Wendy said. "Think hard."

For a moment Mr. McQuillock's ghostly form faded, but then it glowed brighter. "Why—that's—did you see that?"

"What?" Dipper asked.

"That bright light! It was so beautiful! And did you hear?"

Wendy said, "Sorry. I think the light and whatever you heard were just for you."

"I heard Ruby Nelle calling my name! 'Cappy,' she said. 'Cappy, trust them.' She always called me Cappy."

"Let's make a deal," Dipper said.

* * *

Before the midnight hour struck—well, it didn't, there were no clocks in the house, but midnight came—Casper McQuillock was so excited he looked semi-solid. "Agreed!" he said. "We'll meet in June. Just call my name—you can even call me Cappy!—and I'll appear. We'll plan out everything! I can't handle tools, but I can sure give you some ideas. We'll have this place fixed up so nice that—that some lucky family—you know, I can already feel Earth loosening its hold on me. Can we do the children's room first?"

"Absolutely," Wendy said. "We promise."

"Because then, once it's done—I'm going to go see my Ruby Nelle again. I know I am!"

* * *

Wendy and Dipper didn't get back to the Shack until close to one A.M. The lights were on in the dining room, and they found Mabel there at the table, pounding away on Dipper's laptop. "Hi!" she said. "Dipper, I got it! Inspiration struck! I listened to our Grunkles' oral histories again, and—here, read this."

* * *

_Every family is special, and my family's the same as all the rest. That isn't as paradoxical as you might think. Bear with me and I'll explain by telling how my two favorite relatives, my great-uncle Stanley and his brother, my great-uncle Stanford, have come to mean so much to me. Like my brother and me, they are twins. And like my brother and me, they're opposites. Stanley is a master entertainer with a deep understanding of people. Stanford is a brilliant scientist with a deep understanding of how the universe works. And whenever they're in the same room, they're quarreling and complaining and having the time of their lives. I love them both because they've taught me the most important lesson in life: You don't have to like someone to love them._

* * *

"Great start, Mabel," Dipper said.

She yawned. "Gonna go to bed in a little while. Just want to get this page done first. You two look happy."

"We figured out a way to make some money," Dipper said. "Plus we figured out a way to reunite a dead guy with his dead wife."

"You freaks!" Mabel said, laughing. "A ghost, huh? Sorry I missed that!"

"You can still meet him, Mabes," Wendy said. "Come up this summer and help us design a dream home."

"For when you get married?"

"No, not us," Dipper said. "For some lucky couple we don't know and haven't met yet. But your artistic touch would be—"

"Say no more. I'll be there."

* * *

Dipper walked Wendy out to her car. "You awake enough to drive home?" he asked.

"I'll be fine. Just two, three miles."

"Be careful," he said. "For me."

"And for poor Mr. McQ. And for Mabel. And for the kids you and I might just have one day." She kissed him. "Good night, my freak."

"Good night, my beautiful, wonderful freak."

They kissed once more under the stars and he went in and she went home, just two happy freaks so deep in love they were in way over their heads and enjoying the feeling with every second and every heartbeat.

* * *

**The End - _And that puts a lid on Wendip Week 2019 for me! _**


End file.
